11 Teams I’d Love to See on the Amazing Race

Darren Rowse has announced another group writing project, this time with prizes. The challenge is to write a list post. So I’m going to turn a post I’ve been working on for a while into a list post and see if I can win me a prize.

I admit it, I dig the Amazing Race. I thought BJ and Tyler were great and I’m glad they won.

Now I want Phil and company to do a Blogosphere Edition. It would be high entertainment, even if nobody ever made it to the finish line. Here are the teams.

1. Randy Morin and Robert Gale. The fun brokers as a team would be the new BJ and Tyler, plus they would be good for about 4 belly laughs a show. Plus if they ended up in Wales, wherever that is, Robert could read the signs.

2. Henry Blodgett and Larry Page. They could travel in Larry’s party plane and Henry could explain to him why it, like Google, is a bad investment.

3. Om Malik and Carrot Top. They’re both into phones. Plus Carrot Top knows how to fly.

4. Mathew Ingram and Dave Winer. Since Dave probably invented the Amazing Race years ago, he would know how to beat the system. And if not, he would be happy just beating on Mathew.

5. Thomas Hawk and Jill Greenberg. At some point during the race, Jill would burst into tears and Thomas could take pictures. And sell them.

6. Chris Anderson and Lee Gomes. Maybe there would be stops in Manila and the Congo, where Lee could treat Chris to a rematch.

7. Ken Leebow and Snoop Dogg. As they race around the world, Snoop could teach Ken how to really talk like a gangsta.

8. Robert Scoble and Ze Frank. Being teammates would allow Robert to fawn over Ze Frank in person (now I’m never going to get back on Scoble’s reading list).

9. Mike Arrington and Nick Douglas. For obvious reasons.

10. Kevin Hales and Tom Morris. Their arguments about politics alone would be Emmy material. They wouldn’t make it from the starting point to their car, but a show on CNN would be waiting for them when they got back.

11. Jason Calacanis and his dog. I don’t mean Steve Case, I mean his other one. The one that is on his blog and plays the Joe C. role at blog star parties.

It’s a tough race to handicap. Om and Carrot Top, Mike and Nick and Kevin and Tom would be longshots. Jason couldn’t carry his dog the way he carries AOL so they’d be out pretty early. Mathew and Dave might do OK as long as Dave focused on fighting with Mathew and not assorted taxi drivers and ticket agents. Snoop would put a cap in Ken the second time he used the word yo or peeps. Jill would decide that Thomas is exploiting her by taking pictures and quit somewhere in Yugoslavia. Chris and Lee would get lost on a deserted road somewhere.

I’d have to call it a toss-up between the fun brokers, Henry and Larry, and Robert and Ze Frank.

Sounds like a race to me.

Anyone have any additional teams they’d like to propose?

Tags: blogs, blogging, amazing+race

Noblesse Oblige in the Blogosphere

Nick Carr has posted about the innocent fraud that is the notion of an egalitarian blogosphere.

He makes a lot of really good points, including the sadly indisputable fact that the cult of blogging that we all embrace to one extent or the other is not the democratic, all for one and one for all place that we sometimes pretend it is.

I have been very active in the movement to knock down the gates and level the earth in that regard. Now that I actually have some readers, I go out of my way to engage new or undiscovered bloggers. But the fact that I have clawed my way up part of blogger’s hill does not change the fact that it is a hill. Or that I am not yet at the top. Or, more importantly, that there are a ton of people who can think and write better than any of us who are still at the bottom looking for the trail.

Nick’s post is a very thoughtful summary of the state of the blogosphere as it appears to those not at the very top of blogger’s hill. Reading his discussion of the lengths new bloggers have to go to to get recognized by established bloggers is enough to make even the most stalwart climber pause and consider whether the effort is truly worth it.

The idea, espoused by a popular blogger at a recent conference, is that to get links from the so-called blogging elite, you must link to them and add substantive thought to their topic. Without a doubt, that is an honest answer, and probably the most effective way to get some top of the hill links. It is also horribly inefficient, since in a semi-perfect world we would be writing not to get a charitable link, but to further the distributed conversations that some of us believe is the purpose and beauty of blogging. If I speak to you only to promote what you might say to me in response, are we truly talking, or am I merely a beggar asking for alms for the poor?

Does the enlightened A-Lister really believe it is the duty of his position to pass out links to the less fortunate? Hungry peasants can storm the castle. What can lonely bloggers do?

While I may be over-simplifying things a little, I think the so-called blogging elite are no different than any other slice of the population. Some of them are regular folks, confident in themselves and their real word positions. These folks are generally equal-opportunity linkers, probably because they get little of their identity from blogging. Others view their place at the top of blogger’s hill as a birthright, notwithstanding the fact that their place in the succession is often derived largely from the fact they were early adopters of what is still a fringe activity. Most are somewhere in between the two extremes.

But it is a hard climb, just to get where they can hear you if you call out. There’s no denying that.

Like Nick’s peasant listening to the party from outside the castle walls, I have a mental list of other bloggers who seem to go out of their way to link around me. Sometimes I get a little insecure and wish I could force them into a real world discussion of whatever issue is at hand, just so I could show them that having a popular blog doesn’t make them as smart as they think. But mostly I just chuckle and move on to conversations with those who are willing.

All of this reminds me of a recent post by OmegaMom, one of my favorite newish bloggers. She recounted reading a Pew report that found that most people blog for “creative, personal expression.”

Maybe it’s the act of expression that matters, and not so much the reaction to such expression.

Trees continue to fall in the vacant woods. The only question is whether they make any sound.

New Blog for Dads

Mike Miller, whose other blog I have read for some time, has started a new blog for dads called Be a Good Dad. I’ve just subscribed.

At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark card, if I could only do one thing right it would be to be a good dad to my kids. They make everything worthwhile.

Among Mike’s posts so far are:

10 steps to a happier mealtime with kids

Traditions as part of your kid’s normal day

Cheap fun with balloons

and my favorite, the optimistically entitled…

So You Want To Host A Great Toddler Slumber Party

This is good stuff. Go check it out.

The Importance of Being Happy

I have lost interest in the continuing saga of Steve Gillmor’s seemingly self-ignited internet implosion. To anyone who isn’t a close friend or opportunistic groupie, Steve’s recent posts, taunts and fight picking have demonstrated that something is out of kilter over there. I suspect there may be more to it than meets the eye and, above all else, I don’t want to pile on.

So I have quit reading about it and tried to quit writing about it.

But Rogers Cadenhead’s post today about Steve ‘s latest antics contained a line that I find irresistibly funny and completely accurate:

“I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I’ve come to appreciate Gillmor’s bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.”

Maybe Dennis Hopper in another David Lynch film. Blue Velvet sequels into Angry Sandpaper.

What I know is this: no one who is as smart as Steve and makes their living writing writes as incoherently as Steve does unless they are trying to. It’s Naked Lunch, internet -style. Some think it’s clever. Some are confused by it. And some find it to be a pointless waste of energy. I see it as a method of disassociation. Like a cyber-tattoo.

And I just don’t understand why it has to be this way.

I remember the first time I heard a Gillmor Gang podcast. I was amazed at the wit and intellect. Like Alias, however, I was late to the party and got into it right before it started the downward spiral into oblivion. And I remember hearing Steve talk at that Berkley CyberSalon. I was blown away by his logic and tenacity. I miss those days.

I don’t even care about this ridiculous gesture business any more.

I just hope Steve finds some outlet for his intellect and energy that will make him happy.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of being happy. And it’s hard to be happy when you’re mad at everybody.

Peace to you Steve Gillmor. No more harsh words from this corner. You’ll never read this, of course, but maybe the positive karma will find its way to you somehow.

Doc on Doc and Where Did that Cheese Go

I think it might be my growing appreciation for Live Writer that has resulted in an explosion of posts on this last night of my vacation.

Anyway, Doc Searls has a post that quotes Dr. Laura bashing blogs. I used to listen to Dr. Laura on the radio once in a while just to reassure myself that I wasn’t the craziest person on the planet. Sometimes I was between her caller and her, but I was never crazier than both. In an article behind the Santa Barbara News-Press‘s paywall, Dr. Laura proves that blogs are definitely among the many things she knows very little about.

First of all, her blog bashing seems to originate from some negative blog posts one of her flunkies must have shown her:

“Blog-happy? It has only been a couple of weeks that I’ve had this column and I’ve already been attacked by some blogosphere inhabitants of Santa Barbara. Bloggers are folks with their own personal Web sites, which they can use for whatever end they please with impunity. Some of these sites have had a big impact on politics, technology and journalism.”

Can we take from this that if she had been shown blogs praising her, blogs would be the inspired voice of the new media?

And then there’s this nugget, which I about half agree with and about half get irritated at:

“It used to be that folks wrote autobiographies to detail some significant journey or challenge survived, with the desire to share life lessons learned and wisdom gained. No more — now it is as though every errant thought should be embraced by the outside world as having greater significance than the burp it really is.”

Some of the blogs I enjoy the most are about every day events. Good writers can write about a trip to the market and make it compelling. Just like good storytellers can talk about anything and keep you highly entertained. But, if I’m going to be honest, I do come across the occasional exercises in anthropomorphism, generally involving small dogs with sweaters on or cats, naked or clothed, that annoy the dickens out of me. But the reality is that blogs are not, first and foremost, about the subject matter- they are about two things:

(a) the writing, be it great, average or bad; and

(b) a new, faster manner of information distribution and retrieval.

Note that I have recently added a blog search button beside the web search button on The Home Place, my internet portal. Blogs are becoming the medium for the creation of the real life Great Big Book of Everything.

Think about it this way: how much would you pay to be able to read blogs written by your parents, grandparents, etc. One of the benefits of blogs that no one ever talks about is that our kids and grandkids will know us much better thanks to these records we are creating.

It’s one thing for my real world friends to be confused about blogs (the fact that I made a lot of money developing web sites during Bubble 1.0 is about the only thing that keeps them from teasing me mercilessly about my little internet diary), but it’s another thing altogether for someone who has somehow become a part of old media to be so cavalier in her research about and understanding of new media.

Doc’s other point, which is a good one, is that the News-Press is getting left far behind thanks to its insistence on maintaining the paywall that many papers tried and most have abandoned. Google can’t index their stories so people can’t google, er search, for them. The cheese isn’t going to reappear, so it’s time to stop hoping it will and start looking for some new cheese.

Doc offers to meet with the powers that be and explain to them the way the distribution of media, both old and new, works in 2006. They should take him up on it, as he may be the only guy smart and likeable enough to save a paper that pays Dr. freaking Laura to write articles behind a paywall.

Thank goodness my hometown paper has embraced RSS and blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog building

Who Do You Write For – Update

Several people responded to my challenge to consider and then write about who they write their blogs for.

If I missed you, let me know. If you want to join in, I’ll do another update in a few days.

Here’s the list so far:

Rick Anderson (via comment)
Seth Finkelstein (via comment)
Richard Querin
Earl Moore
Chip Camden

Techcerpt: Extreme Political Correctness in the Blogosphere

In last night’s podcast I talked a little bit about the marginal utility of extreme political correctness and how unchecked political correctness can cause too much focus on the small stuff and not enough focus on what really matters.

If you don’t want to listen to some great music before and after, you can just listen to the techcerpt.

Dave Winer, who I talked about in the techcerpt, has some similar thoughts, having had a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to correct his politics lately. Time that could have been spent on something far more important.

Blogger's Challenge: Who Do You Write For?

Who are we, as bloggers, really writing for? Have you ever asked yourself that question?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

The knee-jerk answer, of course, is that different people write for different reasons. Some write for their real world customers. Some write to attract eyeballs attached to fingers that might click on an ad. Some write as a way to market their online products. Some write for themselves. Etc. Etc.

But I am asking the question at a more fundamental level.

Who are the readers of our blogs? Not the intended audience. The actual audience.

Who do we really write for?

My answer: mostly for each other.

I’m just not convinced that blogs have much penetration into the general reading population. Stated another way, I suspect that the large, large majority of readers of any blog, save and except the TechCrunches and Techdirts of the world, are other bloggers and maybe the occasional relative or curious friend.

Even the mega-blogs, whose traffic the rest of us stare at in jealous disbelief, have subscriber numbers in the tens of thousands. TechCrunch has 92,854 subscribers. That’s an incredible number until you consider the fact that there are 300 million people in the US and 6.5 billion worldwide. In context, even TechCrunch’s penetration into the real world is less than insignificant. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have circulation numbers in excess of 2 million, and that doesn’t count tons of people like me who read those papers online or who grab a colleague’s copy after he or she is done with it.

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren’t listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either.

I have been told by a couple of buddies in old media that old media tech writers tend to write for each other as well, so my theory is not limited exclusively to bloggers.

But the more I think about it, I think most bloggers write primarily for each other.

Don’t get me wrong- I enjoy writing. But sometimes it feels vaguely depressing to write something, put it up and wait anxiously for someone to reply via comment or link.

The problem, it seems to me, is that we often overstate the interactive nature of the blogosphere. Sure, blogs are somewhat interactive, but there is still an effort hurdle to be crossed to converse. You have to invest the time and effort to make a comment or write a responsive post. And with everyone talking at once, a lot of things get lost in the static.

And, of course, the rock stars who refuse to have cross-blog conversations with anyone other than other perceived rock stars make blogs seem even less interactive (and more silly) than they really are.

The whole system just seems really inefficient to me.

Which is why we need to ask ourselves why we write and who we are writing for.

So here’s my challenge. Write a paragraph that explains why you write a blog and who you write for. Think about it for a moment first. And be honest. I’ll compile a list (with links), and we’ll see if there are any patterns. Maybe we’ll learn something.

Here’s mine (I trashed and completely rewrote the following paragraph four times):

I write as an outlet for the creative energy that I used to use writing songs, and to initiate conversation with people who share interests of mine that are not generally shared by my real world friends. I write because I like to build things and to see if I can become meaningful in an area other than the one in which I make my living. Fundamentally, I write for the people who will allow me to become part of their conversations, either because they like what I have to say or because they are willing to try to change my mind. And, to be honest, I write to show some of the people who believe they are tech stars that some middle aged ex-farmer from Texas can compete with them on their field, on their terms- and win.

More on Contacting Other Bloggers

TDavid makes some excellent additions to my earlier emailing etiquette post.

His suggestion to make sure the blogger you are emailing hasn’t already written about the same thing is spot on. If you haven’t read their blog, how can you expect them to read your blog?

He also makes a valid point that I assumed emailing is the way to go. Some folks prefer being contacted other ways- IM, Skype, a comment, etc.

Check out his other thoughts about making contact. Good stuff!

Debunking this Gesture Nonsense

Robert Scoble posts today about the gesture business Steve Gillmor has been talking about for some time now.

It’s time to debunk this gesture nonsense once and for all.

Scoble tells of how someone emailed him about a fire in Montana near the town where Scoble’s mom lived before she died. The emailer knew Scoble would be interested because he read Scoble’s blog posts from when he went to visit his mom when she was sick. Somehow the fact of this email explains and supports (at least to Scoble) the whole gesture business.

To call posted or emailed content gestures is the worst sort of nomenclature for the sake of nomenclature. It is “pre-owned cars” times infinity. The only algorithm you need to find these so-called gestures are the web addresses for Google and Technorati. The “information retrieval system” is in place right now, and it has been for years.

The fact that someone who knows Scoble has a connection to a town in Montana emails him a link to an article he might be interested in does utterly nothing to support some revolutionary gesture concept. This sort of thing happens a million times a day. To say that such an email supports the gesture business is like saying the fact the sky is blue supports the fact that I am the King of England.

Lots of people find out lots of things every day via emails and water cooler conversation before they read about it on Google or in the paper. All this proves is that people tell other people things they might be interested in.

More importantly, the gesture theory can be debunked mathematically.

Scoble says he doesn’t have to link to a post he mentions by Fred Wilson, because:

“I didn’t link to Fred Wilson’s blog. Why? Cause if you really cared you’d have read it by now, right? I assume my readers know how to use Google and TechMeme. Cause you’re smarter than me and I can find Fred in both places right now.”

and because:

“Yeah, Steve Gillmor explained to me why NOT linking is better than linking. Tell me Fred, did your traffic from search engines go up today?”

It is a mathematical certainty that at least some people who read Scoble’s post and are interested in what Fred has to say will NOT go to the extra effort to do a Google or Technorati search to find Fred’s post. So the gesture nonsense will frustrate not only those people, who could otherwise have accessed Fred’s post by clicking a link, as well as Fred, who presumably would like interested people to read what he writes. In sum, the theory that it’s better not to link to Fred’s post is void on its face.

It is self-serving bullshit dreamed up by some guys to support their efforts to recreate an internet oligarchy that is both outdated and inconsistent with the beauty and purpose of the new internet. In many ways it is the reaction of the old to the advances of the new. Somebody moved their cheese and they are trying to build a time machine to help get it back.

If you want further proof, ask yourself this question. Why is this gesture business being promoted in lieu of linking, as opposed to in addition to linking? Couldn’t linking and gestures co-exist peacefully? Of course they could. But not if you treat the blogosphere like the Winchester House and obsess on building it and rebuilding it to your tastes to the extent that you never get to the point of enjoying what you have built.

I can’t tell if Gillmor and his crew really believe in this gesture business, or if this is some L. Ron Hubbard-like attempt to meld science fiction and mythology into a new internet religion.

What I can say is that this gesture/non-linking business is the most extreme form of arrogance I have seen in a long time.

The bottom line is that these guys don’t want to link, and they are working like mad to create a philosophy that will support their refusal to do so. That or this is some epic inside joke at the expense of the rest of us.

Either way, the only gesture I see is some guys who, for one reason or another, have the microphone waiving their middle fingers at the rest of us.